The Value of Water

We take for granted our water, magically appearing out of our tap: clean, clear, fresh, healthy and cleansing.  And so this adventure has exposed my senses to this vital resource in a way that I have so often overlooked, presuming someone else's problem, especially when it comes not from the tap, but what happens after it swirls, laden with all kinds of substances, down the drain.

The edge of the estero

You can't help but notice this, and this year especially for me in Ethiopia, Honduras, and now Costa Rica.  That swirling effluent finds its way into the gutters, ditches and creeks that we walk past everyday, wondering how this same white duck, stained from the brown water, can remain in this one fetid pond every day.  That is why I appreciate so much one of our projects this year - the "Laguito Restoration"  (Lagoon) - examining the entire watershed of this small creek that flows eventually under the city toward a larger stream on the eastern side of San Ramon.  I stand on the surrounding hills during my morning walk scanning the unending rooftops, seeing each with their own septic systems below the house, and wonder how much of this untreated effluent, both gray and black water, finds its way into the creek.  I suspect most of it.

Emily Wahlstrand inspecting outflows

Our student team focused on this project includes Emily Wahlstrand, a petite, serious, and curious student studying wetland restoration - our resident expert - anxious to feel the dirt between her fingertips to ascertain its essential qualities.  She is accompanied by Ben Gillard, a serious, muscular and driven veteran formerly working for the Army Corps of Engineers with some experience helping to create silt barrier islands in the Mississippi, and Collin Coltman, a lanky, inquisitive Bio-Based Engineering student with a passion to understand.

 

Collin, Emily and Ben tracing the higland

The four of us decided to walk the watershed perimeter yesterday, to gain a better understanding of how it is functioning, identify its upstream qualities, and assess the pollution sources.  Five miles of hiking took us from the edge of the "estero" and its muddy, brown, oil slicked over-silted and overgrown wetland, past an old sewage treatment plant, tracing our steps past monstrous bamboo thickets, upward around a neighborhood where white foamy washwater could be seen flowing directly from houses into the gutter (and thus into this wetland), higher up, close to the source of one spring fed creek where the trickling water was relatively clear, and to the highest ridge top,  enabling a visual survey of the undulating watershed basin spreading out to the edge of town below us.  To see this, and all the other watersheds extending far into the distant hills, each draining to its tributary creeks, we can realize that our focus on this one creek is but a small part of a very large problem in Costa Rica. This country prides itself on its National Parks and emphasis on conservation, and yet the very lifeblood of all our existence is wantonly polluted and wasted, with no apparent care or attention.

Ben diminished by this huge bamboo thicket

So can these students at least frame a solution that places a value on water and its conservation? Is this a land of riches and abundance of water that its waste is not taken seriously?  It is sad to see.  It is likely we will not change the world with our work, but if we could only change a few minds about the value of water, perhaps we can call that a success.

Contrast this with our zipline tour through the rainforest canopy this afternoon, shrouded in a mist induced fog, moisture evident by glistening leaves and illuminated droplets on their leaf tips, and the river below us, zipping over the rocks below, flowing clear and rapidly with  an audible boil, down, down down toward distant cities, its purity about to be compromised. Water in abundance.

I cannot help but continue to reflect on this on my daily walks, to wonder what happens below my feet.  Maybe it isn't as bad as I make it out to be, by local standards anyway, and I am certainly no civil engineer, but this filthy flowage  seems just wrong.  We will do something to try and change a mind, if only one - it's a start. While my very existence here makes necessary my personal pollution signature, perhaps I can write it small this time - short cool showers using my biodegradable soap seems a reasonable start.

Ziplining the canopy - feel the mist!